The Interior of the Crystal Cathedral, with the "Glory of Easter" set installed. (wikimedia commons)

The Crystal Cathedral Megachurch: Architecting the Rise of Mediated Congregation.

Within the past twenty-five years the American religious landscape has undergone a dramatic transformation. The rise of a style of worship, coined “megachurch”, has created a central role for new media within the religious experience. Blends of audio, visual, and communications technologies framed within postmodern architectural forms constitute a spectacular re-imagning of Christian cultural practice. These re-contextualizations of secular technologies carry particularly symbolic meaning; for believers, megachurches make visible God's hand at work in the conditions of 20th and 21st century mediated social life.

This talk reads the cultural logic of the megachurch by focusing on a pioneering and particularly influential institution, the Crystal Cathedral (1955 – present). Home to a congregation of more than 10,000 members and broadcast internationally, the Crystal Cathedral is one of the most visible Protestant churches in the world. Moreover, the Cathedral's unique history provides an important genealogy for the migration of electronic media and modern architectural practices into American religious practice. The ministry brought automobiles and drive-in cinema (1955 – 1961), then glass, steel, and television (1962 – 1970), and finally architectural postmodernism and the Internet (1980 – present) into worship. By tracing their translation across multiple technological moments I will demonstrate the role of the church, from postwar to present, in determining technological meaning. By inscribing socio-technical arrangements with spiritual significance, megachurches legitimate the production of networked geographies. Technologies, re-framed by ritual use, collective social experience, and Christian cosmology, become a platform for mediated congregation.

Erica Reyna Robles is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her research focuses on the role media technologies play in the production of space. In particular, she concentrates on configurations that enable a sense of public, collective, or shared experience, especially through the structuring of visibility and gaze. Trained as both an experimental psychologist and a cultural historian she has employed a range of methodologies to explore the definition of media-space. She is currently writing a book about the 20th century transformation of Protestant worship space into a highly mediated, spectacular "megachurch."

Prior to her position at Steinhardt she was a Research Fellow in New Media and Architecture in joint affiliation with the Department of Art History and the Humanities and Technology Laboratory (HUMlab) at the University of Umeĺ, in Sweden. Robles holds a Ph.D. in Communication from Stanford University.